Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus, has now raised $7 million in funding for his new business venture after leaving the Chinese company two months ago. There is still a lot of secrecy surrounding his startup, but Pei did reveal some details on the company’s future plans.
The Chinese-born Swedish entrepreneur has managed to gather an impressive group of investors for his brand new venture. Pei has raised $7 million in a seed financing round, and list of investors includes some of his friends and high-profile names from the tech industry.
The list of investors of Pei’s startup includes the former vice-president of Apple, also referred to as “the father of the iPod,” Tony Fadell; the popular vlogger/YouTuber Casey Neistat, who currently has 12.2 million subscribers; the co-founder of the world’s biggest live streaming platform – Twitch, Kevin Lin; and the CEO of “the front page of the internet” – Reddit, Steve Huffman.
Some of the other investors are Liam Casey, who is the founder and chief executive of PCH; Paddy Cosgrave, the founder of Web Summit; Josh Buckley, the CEO of Product Hunt, and a group current and ex-employees of Truecaller.
There is not much known about Carl Pei’s startup, other than the company is working on audio-related products, which are reportedly coming next year. Pei said that the new funds will be used to set-up an office in London, even though UK is in the process of Brexit. Pei thinks that London is a good place, and there’s good talent in the city especially related to design and user experience.
Other than establishing a new office in London, the funds will be used for research and development, and for hiring talent for the entrepreneur’s brand new startup. In fact, Carl Pei tweeted at 4:11 PM IST, announcing that they’re now hiring. The tweet reads:
Let’s build the future together. https://t.co/kAOta4Fwkk
— Carl Pei (@getpeid) December 9, 2020
In the about us section of the job description, the company still doesn’t reveal anything about itself. This is what it says: “We aren’t able to say much for now except that we believe the tech world needs a fresh breeze of change.” Though it is interesting to note that the company starts hiring the same day the news about its funding goes out, which can be seen a strategic move.
The young Swedish entrepreneur founded OnePlus with Pete Lau in 2013. He soon became the face of the company, and headed several critical product releases including OnePlus Nord, which are very much responsible for the company’s current popularity. He quit OnePlus in October, which soon made headlines, as it was something nobody had expected.
There were several rumors surrounding his decision to leave the company including one which claimed that there was a power struggle between Pete Lau and him. However, Pei says that he has nothing against the time he spent in the company, and that he made the decision because he wanted to explore something new. Now, we finally have some news about the entrepreneur’s new venture, and it will be interesting to see what the company is about and what it will achieve in the coming future.
